Type II critical behavior of gravitating magnetic monopoles

Abstract

I study type II critical collapse in the spherically symmetric gravitating magnetic monopole system. This is an Einstein-Yang-Mills-Higgs system with two matter fields: a field parametrizing the scalar field gauged under SU(2) and a field parametrizing the gauge field. This system offers interesting differences compared to what is commonly found for type II collapse in other systems. For example, instead of the critical solution sitting between collapse and complete dispersal of the matter fields, on the non-black hole side of the critical solution, the matter fields settle down to a static and stable configuration. More interesting, however, is that I find strong evidence for the existence of two critical solutions, each with their own set of scaling and echoing exponents, which I determine numerically.